Sodor Railway Friends
NOTE: This article goes over the web series titled "Sodor Railway Friends." This is not to be confused with the ROBLOX game of the same name. Sodor Railway Friends is a Thomas Wooden Railway series created by ExpitheCat uploaded on his "TTTE Brony" channel. Throughout the end of 2013 and first half of 2014, the series was commonly talked about by him to his friends and family, with him buying materials and props just for the series, however the series was ultimately cancelled 8 episodes in, and the episodes were unlisted a few months later. Episodes # GB and the Trucks # Thomas and Mario # Percy's Discovery # Edward Saves the Day # Emily and the Express # Bash, Dash and the new Diesel # Gordon's Big Mess # GB and the Trucks Premise Sodor Railway Friends was a Thomas Wooden Railway fan series that had an emphasis on both the classic characters and his and his friends' OCs, as sort of an alternative universe of the Thomas and Friends canon with it's own cast of characters. The series ended up growing to have ideas of a Thomas/MLP crossover (mostly with the characters of GB and Joonas on the "Ponyville" Railway), however in the end it would ultimately be cancelled after only eight episodes. History In summer of 2013, ExpitheCat ended up being brought back into Thomas and Friends after watching a few videos and episodes of the series again. A few months after, he decided to come up with a new series using his Thomas Wooden Railway toys and other merchandise that could be used with them. After this, the series ended up being heavily talked about by him as ideas were passed about the series, eventually growing to the idea of lightly having focus on MLP characters in some episodes. When the series was brought up, he decided he would need his Thomas Wooden Railway stuff to be brought back out of storage, a new SD card for his camera and another model of Emily to use for his friends' OC "Joonas." While this was going on, he decided to plan the series out. In August 2013, he decided to create a channel called "TTTE Brony" for focusing on Thomas and Friends content, keeping it away from his main channel. At the beginning of 2014, he decided to advertise the series a bit by making a game adaption of the same name on ROBLOX and making a deviantART account with one of the influences being him advertising the series. He ended up getting his TWR merchandise out of storage in April of 2014, and ended up getting an SD card and buying another Emily for his TWR series. Finally, he uploaded the first episode on June 16, 2014, and throughout the next month continued to make more episodes of the series. The series had been generally liked by his friends and even some random Youtubers that had watched and commented on some episodes. After concluding GB's first story arc with the eighth episode, however, he ended up suddenly stopping the series completely. Hiatus Throughout the series' creation, ExpitheCat ran into a few issues, with one of the biggest issues being his camera often running through batteries really quickly. When filming the series, ExpitheCat could only film about two episodes until he had to change the batteries. Another issue was due to the entire set taking up his bedroom floor, making moving around difficult for him and giving him no place to sit down, causing him to become unsteady when filming the series. Often, other materials from his bedroom were caught by the camera, like his bookshelf and his PS1, in addition to him having to use his hand in the series due to him not having any sort of invisible wire/thread to move the engines along. All this combined, his interest in the series began to dwindle through the next month. However, to solve his personal problem of having the set taking up his floor, he decided to use an idea created by certain TWR youtubers to have small, individual sets on his table and film from that. This gave him more accessibility to using more tracks in one scene, however this did not work well for him due to his table being slightly small and cramped in certain circumstances which would hurt the series in episodes where engines carry large trains. He filmed the ninth episode using this format anyway, and ended up editing it. However, he never uploaded it due to the other issues. This led to the series' first hiatus. A month later, ExpitheCat started to brainstorm new ideas while in Arizona. He decided to replace the other episodes he had planned for the rest of the season with others and he ended up having the idea to shorten the season and eventually film a movie following the ending of it. He ended up writing the script to the next episode he had planned, and completely filmed the episode. However, the episode simply did not get edited or uploaded. Cancellation After filming the ninth episode, ExpitheCat was unable to continue with editing the video. At the time, he only had access to one microphone used in his house, however that microphone ended up being used a lot by his brother, and as a result he had no way of editing the video and reading the script he had written to go along with the footage he got. He still was determined to get the episode out, so he ended up waiting for the right opportunity to use the microphone while also brainstorming ideas for the future of the series. Eventually, that opportunity came, but when he went in to record the script, he just stopped. He ended up realizing he didn't have the energy to record and simply wasn't in the mood, and realized he had lost any interest he had for the series overall despite talking about it a lot over the previous year. It was at this moment where he decided the series was cancelled. After confirming the series had been cancelled, ExpitheCat ended up slowing down on his interest in Thomas as well. While he would watch episodes and even build layouts from time to time, his interest in Thomas simply didn't peak much after the cancellation. He ended up uploading a few videos on his TTTE Brony account, but for a long period of time forgot the password and lost access to the account, but he ended up gaining access to it again around summer 2016. Between then and the cancellation of the series, he ended up going back and forth on whether or not to reboot the series and/or continue it altogether or not. He talked about doing a reboot of the series in summer 2016, but ultimately decided against it not long later. With his interest of filming as well as TWR overall continuing to shrink, a reboot or continuation of the series at this point is heavily unlikely, especially considering him moving on to other ideas. Out of his cancelled ideas throughout the years, ExpitheCat considers the cancellation of Sodor Railway Friends to be one of his own biggest disappointments, due to him hyping up the series heavily and even buying the props just for the series like the TWR Emily. He feels the series ended up being an example of him causing himself too much hype to see the shortcomings that would take place, and ultimately does wish he could go back on some things about it if he could. When put into retrospect, ExpitheCat also feels that they also did not plan the series very well, and as a result burned themselves out very quickly due to trying to get out at least one or two episodes a week. Category:Web series Category:Youtube series Category:TWR series Category:Cancelled projects